Your loving brother, Dick

"Keep faith and your day of prosperity and happiness shall reign." --John Warren Flynn

     My father was stationed in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, with the Army Air Corps in 1945 to train on the bigger and faster B-29s. During his stay here, from June to July, he met and fell in love with a beautiful local girl named Lorna Pearson. From our conversations, I gathered that Lorna was different from his European conquests; she was the kind of girl that he would have wanted to bring home to meet his mother--the kind of girl he wanted to marry. Despite their compatibility, they were separated by their religious differences (he was Catholic and she was not) and, eventually, the end of the war.

     Four years later, Dad received an invitation to Lorna's wedding. At age 23, just one year older than his brother Larry was when he lost his life in the South Pacific, my father pontificated on his "Lost Love." He even quoted his brother, who cited a line from Matthew Arnold's poem "Sohrab and Rustum" on the back of one of his "Augustine Aviaries" business cards: "Do thou the deeds I die too young to do." A year later, he would meet Marilyn Peirce, a woman whom he was indeed proud to introduce to his mother, a woman whom he wanted to marry--and a woman who was willing to convert to Catholicism. They were married on January 1, 1954.

     Knowing my father and his tremendous love for my mother, the "lost love" that he felt in 1949 was replaced with "love found." And I don't think he ever looked back.

"My father! thou must live.

For some are born to do great deeds, and live,

As some are born to be obscured, and die.

Do thou the deeds I die too young to do,

And reap a second glory in thine age;

Thou art my father, and thy gain is mine." --1853